Shuffle and Breakdown

Finalist for the 1st and 2nd annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

Cody Walker’s Shuffle and Breakdown, his first collection and a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2005 and 2006, is a work of comic brilliance and devastating irony. From "Abbott and Costello: The Alzheimer’s Years" to a series of letters to Whitman from his imagined grandson, this is a wondrous strange book that operates with the precise timing of a great joke, while bracing itself for dissolution and worse.

Shuffle and Breakdown

You’ll need your wits about you when you read this astonishing book. Cody Walker keeps working surprises, setting traps, yanking rugs from underfoot – and I must say, I enjoyed myself no end. ‘Escalation, 2007,’ for instance, sounds as if written by a Mother Goose high on LSD. Walker is unique, no mere trickster but a serious craftsman who blurs the line of demarcation between sober poetry and light verse. Though he sometimes writes in forms usually frivolous – limericks, double dactyls, clerihews – he can do so with dark import. An amazing series of letters from a fictitious grandson of Walt Whitman is alone worth the price of admission.” – X. J. Kennedy

“In this case, the voice comes from some ways off, at an unexpected angle. Cody Walker’s poems are singular, and severally strong. Shuffle and Breakdown is more than an assemblage; it’s a collection with a subtending architecture, so that while one is savoring local pleasures – a brash simile, an odd and antic rhyme – one is aware of the book’s shapely whole. Like Roethke, who also had a Pacific Northwest background, Walker makes adroit use of fractured nursery rhyme. Like Whitman, with whom he shares a taste for the out-flung, Walker means to be comprehensive. But Shuffle and Breakdown is more than a toting up of its influences. Here’s a wry and rueful and utterly appealing new sensibility.” – Brad Leithauser

Reviews of Shuffle and Breakdown

Ann Arbor Online, November 2009
"Although I am an avid reader of contemporary poetry, I understand why many people, predisposed to the art because of their appreciation of the great poems of the past, have chosen to ignore its current practitioners. Unless you stay up with theoretical or conceptual models, some contemporary poetry can seem impenetrable, or at least doesn’t appear to give enough compensation for the effort the reader must give it. Sometimes the language can seem completely flat, with none of the interesting sound patterns we expect from poems.

Sometimes, but not always: witness the delightful and provocative poetry of Cody Walker. Recently arrived in Ann Arbor from Seattle, where he was once elected Seattle Poet Populist, Walker published his first book, Shuffle and Breakdown, just a few months ago. In it, Walker shows that he can be smart without being pretentious, formal without being conservative, and funny without being slight. He has an ease, even a fascination with often dismissed forms, and plays with them in new ways …

Walker includes some short prose poems that he calls ‘The Cheney Correspondence (Selected).’ There are surprising numbers of contemporary poems that deal in one way or another with the former vice president; I think poets could simply not believe he really said and did some of the things he did, so they tried to present some kind of sensitivity in the face of his callousness. Walker simply assumes that the vice president would be interested in a shared humanity. ‘Dear Dick Cheney,’ he writes, ‘When I was younger I wanted to be a baseball player. But I can’t remember whether I loved baseball, or whether I just wanted everyone to love me. A confession, then: I still want everyone to love me – blindly, entirely, without sense or reason. Even you, whom I’ve regularly excoriated. Fondly, Cody Walker.’ Of course the moment is funny precisely because we all know Cheney wouldn’t care in the least. – Keith Taylor